Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Geek Shit Vol VIII

All three of these posts made me angry! Of course, given the name of the blog, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised.

iPhone 4 and iPad Tracking, Recording Your Every Move

Big Brother has been exposed yet again as hackers Peter Warden and Alasdair Allen discovered an unencrypted file on their devices with a long record of location and time stamps. Warden has since provided an open source program that allows you to map these locations visually. This begs the question: Why the hell is Apple tracking this data, and what are they using it for?!

"The discovery is the latest in a series of alarming incidents that serve as cautionary tales about privacy in the always-connected mobile era.

"Recently, German politican and privacy advocate Malte Spitz sued his phone carrier Deutsche Telekom to get every piece of information it had about him. The carrier delivered to him a gigantic file containing 35,000 data points of his location for six months. Later, a German publication plotted Spitz’s data onto an interactive map.

"This iPhone and iPad privacy leak is eerily similar, and creepier, considering that Apple has sold over 100 million iPhones and 15 million iPads."

Freedom on the Net 2011 is a new report that has come out examining free speech online in 37 countries. In almost two thirds of the countries surveyed, bloggers and other less-prominent users faced harassment for their views expressed on the internet. On the more extreme end, cyber attacks from governments against their critics have intensified in 12 different countries.

"The report spotlights a quintet of countries that it sees as 'particularly vulnerable to deterioration' over the next 12 months: Jordan, Russia, Thailand, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. China, Iran, Tunisia, and Belarus are highlighted when it comes to recent crackdowns on state critics. Now under new leadership, Tunisia's Internet status is in flux, but Freedom on the Net calls the Chinese government 'a major global source of cyberattacks.'"

The report in particular singles out China. While not every cyberattack reviewed was traced directly back to the Chinese government, given the scope and organization of these attacks, the Communist Regime is the most likely perpetrator of the majority of attempts to limit free speech in the region. You may remember my outrage over China's blocking of web searches of the term "Egypt" during the downfall of the Mubarak regime.

OkCupid published stats this week that indicate that if you use Twitter regularly, you are likely to have less success in maintaining a long-term relationship.

"Among OkCupid‘s findings are two conclusions about Twitter users. The first one: People who use Twitter every day tend to have shorter relationships, and the problem gets worse as a person gets older, according to its analysis of 833,987 OkCupid users. The average relationship for an 18-year-old who uses Twitter is about nine months, while “everybody else” usually has a relationship average of nine-and-a-half months. At age 50, the frequent tweeter has a 15 month-long relationship, while the non-frequent Twitter user stays in a relationship for an average of almost 17 months.

"The dating website has another conclusion that is sure to catch some eyeballs. If someone is a frequent tweeter, he or she is more likely to masturbate (or at least report that he or she is masturbating). Based off data from 21,315 users, OkCupid concludes that there is a 2-to-1 chance that someone who tweets daily is masturbating on any given day, a higher chance than everybody else."

Shut up, OkCupid! Just because I don't want to have any arguments that last longer than 140 letters doesn't mean I can't maintain a commitment!